By Jon Lawrence
During this engagingly written background of electioneering in Britain from the eighteenth century to the current, Jon Lawrence explores the altering dating among politicians and public. all through this era, he argues, British politics has been characterised via bruising public rituals meant to bestow legitimacy on politicians through obliging them to stand a regularly irreverent public on generally equivalent phrases. Face-to-face interplay used to be vital either to the disorderly civic rituals of eighteenth-century politics, and to the Victorian and Edwardian election assembly. probably unusually, it additionally survived in lovely impolite healthiness among the wars, regardless of the emergence of the hot mass verbal exchange media of radio and cinema. however the related can't be stated of the post-war period and the increase of tv. this day so much politicians are content material in simple terms to provide the illusion of significant engagement--walkabouts, canvassing and conferences are all designed to make sure that such a lot senior politicians come into touch in basic terms with the smiling faces of that dwindling band, the "party faithful." Lloyd George and Churchill may need relished the tough and tumble of a tumultuous public assembly, yet their smooth opposite numbers are typically extra risk-averse (and no longer with out cause, on condition that the cameras are regularly current to trap their mishaps). yet this isn't one other nostalgic lament for a misplaced "golden age." to the contrary, Electing Our Masters argues that politicians often nonetheless crave the kudos to be derived from bruising encounters with an irreverent public--hence Tony Blair's so-called "masochism procedure" within the 2005 election crusade, with its succession of gruelling classes prior to reside studio audiences. As Lawrence issues out, the very important query for at the present time is: will we convince our broadcasters that such encounters needs to shape a staple of contemporary, mediated politics?
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Extra info for Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair
Sample text
Firstly, as O’Gorman has acknowledged, customs did begin to change after 1832. Partly, this reflected the radical changes in who possessed the vote (both which people and which places). But it also reflected changes in the nature of elections. The introduction of the new system of voter registration allowed for much swifter polling. m. )—a far cry from the days when polling might last for Fig. 3. ‘The Election at Eatanswill’ from Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers (1836), reproduced with the kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library john bull at the hustings 33 many weeks.
As in the larger boroughs, it seems likely that one important factor here was the growing influence of the press, both national and countybased, which encouraged the further penetration of national issues into local politics, and made it easier for aspiring politicians to float a possible candidacy. ¹⁴ But if an emergent ‘public opinion’ was beginning to reshape electoral politics in the first decades of the nineteenth century, it was during 28 john bull at the hustings the great reform crisis of 1831–2 that it became a transformative force.
But this picture of elite control can be overstated. For one thing, the old freeman vote, which had been particularly strongly linked to brazen bribery before 1832, was greatly curtailed by the 1832 Act. Many MPs resisted the outright abolition of these ancient rights, either on the radical grounds that they represented the most democratic elements of the franchise, or on the good tory grounds that ancient rights and privileges were sacrosanct. But Whig leaders distrusted the venal habits of the poor, and were determined to ensure that the new electorate would be dominated by voters with sufficient means to be capable of independent judgement.